Website Security: How to Use Our IP Blocker

One of the many free tools available to EarthLink Web Hosting customers in their Web Hosting Control Center is our easy-to-use IP Blocker.

The IP Blocker is one of the ways you can keep your website secure and protect your business. Using this tool, you can protect your website from being viewed from particular IP addresses or a range of IPs.

Why would you want to do that? We’ll, you may become aware, by looking at your website visitor logs or, especially, error logs, that there are huge numbers of requests for files that don’t exist.

Many of these “visitors” (likely robots) may be from countries like China or Russia, even though your products or services are not available in those countries. So these visits to your website are likely made by malicious spammers or hackers trying to find a backdoor to damage your site, hijack your mail program, or harm you in some other way.

So, whenever you are aware of any malicious visitors to your website, you can use the IP Blocker tool to block their access so they can’t return to cause problems for you.

Choose a location (within your /public directory) that you would like to protect. Note: Protecting any website directory blocks access to all its sub-directories as well. So, for example, if you protect your main /public/ directory, your whole website will be protected from being viewed by your list of blocked IP addresses.

Enter an IP address you want to block in the text field and click Add IP. To block multiple IP addresses, click the Add more IPs link, which will expand the text field (enter multiple IPs separated by a space, comma or semi-colon). You can specify either full, individual IP addresses or partial networks. For example, entering 10.10.1 – will block the entire network 10.10.1.x but entering 10.10.1.5 will block only that particular IP address.

Click the Protect Location button and the IP addresses you entered will not be able to access your website.

Use the Manage Protected Locations section to block additional IP addresses or to remove IPs you had previously blocked.